Sylvia's Paradox
Sylvia Plath said this:
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath
It's astounding to me. I admire her writing so much, and this is such a fearless quote. And yet, I have to be honest and think any mother who abandons her child by committing suicide is both desperate and has my extreme empathy . . . and also somehow has lost her courage.
But taking the quote on its own, I think it resonates so much with me. I know aspiring writers want, very much so, to see their name on a cover. I know I did before I was published. But there's most definitely this aspect to being published that no one tells you about. How utterly naked it feels once your book is out there. One, it's being dissected in the public arena--for good or bad. Two, in the era of the Internet, anyone can say anything about you, about your book, and it's there for others to read and see. And finally, there is always an element, I have discovered, of people assuming you borrowed heavily from your own life and therefore your fiction is a thinly disguised bit of autobiography. Your sex scenes must represent your sex life (how else could you write about it?). Your characters' fractured relationships and foibles must be bits and pieces of your own.
It never bothered me much what people thought about me. I was used to being the slightly odd one my whole life. I was a loner, into books more than people. But Sylvia Plath definitely nailed it. When I became published, in a sense, so did my family. When women at signings would share that they really related to Cassie Hayes's difficult relationship with her mother, and they seemed to assume that was MY relationship with my own mother, I felt the strangeness of strangers reading much between the lines. Sometimes I would pause . . . just how dark did I want to take book x or book y? What would people think about ME if I wrote The Roofer?
And then there's the other half of her quote. That in fact, like all authors, I DO borrow from my own life. I couldn't have written Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven had I not, at one point or another because of my own illness, contemplated my children going on without me. Now that Older Daughter is an articulate, near-adult in her own right, she can share the pain of her memories of childhood always being colored by my hospital stays, of I.V. poles in the living room, of my "always being sick" (in her memory). So yeah . . . am I in that book? Definitely. But I didn't hold back.
I am not a fearless person. In fact, I have days consumed by self-doubt. I actually think I have a lot more fear than the average person--that's what an overactive imagination will do for you. But I guess courage is sticking your head into the wind and going forward anyway. It's writing anyway.
I feel for Sylvia Plath. I do. Given the end of her life, the quote is such a paradox. But I'm glad I have the quote here anyway.
Thoughts?
